Awake And Bake Finn Again He awoke from his dreams of companionship that were in-between the nightmares of isolation. He had dreamed so much during the night that he woke up feeling tired. On his way to the bathroom he found a present the cat had left in the hallway and he picked up the mouse parts from the rug. The cat had brought the mouse in the house through the cat door to chase it down and play with it until it was no fun anymore. “Reverse mouser,” he muttered. Stink Pickle the cat knew the difference between real mice and toy mice but sometimes she treated a toy mouse as real. She would put her toy mouse into the dry food or water dish; it was like she playing with dolls. Did they not need to eat and drink? He contemplated the powers that be who played with humanity like a cat with a mouse and who wanted the worthless eaters, of which he was one, to die. He had heard there was the threat of biological weapons pointed at his specific race that would kill him dead. The earth would be cleaned to begin again and this thought weighed heavily on him as he went to breakfast, coffee and paper. Life was a cosmic mousetrap, invisible to the eye and forever closing in on you. He would give up but there was no one to surrender to. Already in the kitchen the wife said, “Good morning Mr. Pig Finn and how are you?” She knew of his predilection toward morose silence. He knew she knew and it wearied him. “Morning lady pig,” he tried to say but his uncaffinated vocal cords barely moved. After a sip and a sit down and a look at the headlines the blue jays landed on the railing of the porch outside and looked at him through the window and squawked. “They’re calling your name Mr. Pig,” she teased. “My blue birds of happiness,” he said dourly. He got up and threw a handful of peanuts out the sliding glass door for the birds and a few squirrels quickly materialized for their share. The greedy birds each swallowed a whole nut which they stored in their craws and then picked up one in the beak and flew off into his back yard rain forest north of Seattle. Occasionally he would find peanuts planted here and there in the yard and he wondered if the jays were expecting a giant peanut tree to grow someday. Back at the table Pickle cat begged for some canned food, turning her back on the dry food. He gave her some left over tuna which she speedily snubbed as he knew she would. “What is scheduled for your agenda today?” he asked Lady Pig and did not mention his perennially heavy thoughts in which death looked at him in his minds eye in a myriad ways constantly threatening. As she told him in detail the mundane intricacies of her day he considered that life was a mad proposition unstable and animalistic, doomed by its nature because all that lived would die, yet live he did against the odds in relatively comfortable ennui overwhelmed by possibilities and limited by assets. He invented constant compromises around abstract ideas in fantasy scenarios during familiar conversations with himself. What was truth, what was reality? A priest communed with god while a gang banger shot his rivals. Scientists invented cures for what killed us and weapons to destroy anything that lived. What was the sense, the causality, the underlying theme? Was it evil brought about by greed or demons? Did chaos underlie the structure of nature? There was no way to pin down the squiggling mass of humanities ideas as they writhed in a million different directions weather glued to television programs or plotting mischief in the church or streets. Man seemed like a monkey, but instead of swinging from limb to limb, he swung from idea to idea. To be content in ones own room seemed the holy answer but it threatened death by boredom. The fact is no one was happy. Now if people could just accept that and be happy... “Your day to cook,” she reminded him. “Harrumph,” he growled After breakfast he went to his den. Full of caffinenergy he put on some light classical music and sat at his computer and mind swam the news and comics, the pornographic gutters and the man labeled utterances of god and wondered how they coexisted when each proposition was seen as a serious endeavor and there were no clear distinctions except for the clicks of a mouse button. It was like Alfred Jarry’s theory of pataphysics, one random imaginary solution after another. Was he a man or a mouse? A hero or a louse with a mouse in his house? It depended upon which screen was on his computer at any given moment. He turned on the television and flicked through all the channels over and over. They were full of the symbolic jive intrusion of ersatz culture loved by the lowest common denominator. They flashed into his field of vision in endless repeating images of murder and success and war and corruption which were crossed by absurd attempts at love and normalcy, people talking on cell phones, phony pundits and obscene amounts of consumption, spending money being the eternal solution to all problems. If it weren't for cable television he would never have known how important hair removal is for so many people. “I came, I saw, I changed channels,” he muttered. He thought, ‘The media spreads darkness at the speed of light. Good advertising equates to a phony person doing something phony to sell us something phony at a phony price. Advertising advertises advertising. Was Christ on the cross the greatest advertising icon ever?’ The only truth on TV seemed to come from the phony news show on the Comedy Channel. Watching TV was like worshiping at the electronic shrine. The endless religious channels were forever threatening and cajoling, scaring the money out of people in an evil way by threatening their souls with the holy cattle prod of guilt. Finn had an epiphany as big as a hyp eponymous. If god created everything than god created evil as well but it was up to the individual to chose life or oppression even though nature proved that to kill was to live, just ask the house cat chasing a mouse. Finn thought he could believe in god but not in a church administered by men. To him god and the universe were synonymous. The dragons within were the ones to be slain. The media was obviously not guilty of substance use. Advertising's goal was to create discontent, sort of the opposite of Buddhism. He stopped at the boring congressional channel and thought government was a misnomer for mismanagement and theft. The terrorism of walking down the street was unmatched by bombs exploding in distant countries. The cave man next door who enjoyed hurting and killing small animals, what he called hunting and fishing for relaxation, was more frightening to Finn than nameless faceless unknown extremists that never appeared in his neighborhood. He felt like a free radical in the body politic. Damn the alcoholics, cork and oak trees in France were becoming extinct but the forbidden hemp could grow anywhere if it were not banned by hard drinking politicians who took money from the alco hole lobbies so they could advertise their murderous drug everywhere as if it were as necessary as water to be found at the nearest drinking hole. ‘There should be lobbies against lobbies,’ he thought. The establishment was always threatened by self medication except for alcohol and tobacco unless they sold the prescription and got their cut. Pain was always overlooked and under rated by the medical establishment in their cruel and unusual way. Those who thought they were right above others were the worst sort, they were morons with self-confidence. The never ending head ache of undimmed reality was so overrated, enforced by blue nose religious puritanicals who claimed to always know better about what you needed than you did and they believed you were better off suffering while their private doctors wrote them scrip for whatever they wanted. How does one describe the pain of being an intelligent sensitive caring thinking person and raised in a brutal primitive culture? Having every care, thought and sensitivity shoved back into your face until you’re told, “You’re crazy because you care.” And they are sane because they don’t care and they like to throw things into people’s faces. Mental anguish is difficult to measure. People say not to let it get to you, you have so much already, you have enough to eat don’t you? Many people in the world don’t even have food. Great, something else to worry about. In the final analysis people spend their lives doing stupid worthless shit while wishing they could do as they pleased. So why not just do as you please in the first place? In a battle of wits, most people are unarmed. The normal human resents enlightenment. Enlightenment, to the normal mind, was madness. But Finn believed that you have to always transcend yourself. He turned off the television. The pile of junk mail sat in places across the surface of his desk. He opened some of them and extracted the authorization forms for loans and credit cards and the phony bank checks and put them into the shred bag and tossed everything else into the garbage. They were like cockroaches of evil; they had to be constantly shucked and paid attention to lest some one get a hold of one and get credit in his name and destroy his life. He went into the garage to clean out the cat box. The cat had dug out a hole and was sticking her butt over the edge of the box and shat on the floor. "Think inside the box!" he yelled at Stink Pickle. Mrs. Pig being out, Finn made himself an avocado sandwich. He considered what might happen if the whole system broke down. He could grow a tree from the avocado seed, and plant a field of wheat for baking bread, grow lettuce and tomatoes and chickens for eggs for the mayonnaise. In about 15 years he could have another sandwich. After eating he did the dishes and started the dishwasher. He needed to do some laundry but Mrs. Pig had left a tee shirt and a table cloth in the washer so he tossed them into the dryer and cautiously put it on low heat and hoped the machines did not burn the house down while he was out. He did a security check around the house, making sure lights were off and the doors were locked. He got into his pick up truck to drive off to get food for dinner. The radio in the truck played Stephen Maulkmus, No More Shoes. Finns idea of hunting and gathering was going to the grocery store. It was a pain in the ass that he lived so far from a store and with the expensive gasoline and the low mileage of the truck he considered building a green house to grow his own food. He thought they should be making ethanol from hemp instead of corn, which just made the price of food higher. The river flowed slowly beside the crowded speeding freeway which reminded him of the continual waste of the dynamic society. He had been to Dublin and seen the river Liffey and walked its streets with its food serving pubs and gamboling parlors all playing American country western music. He hadn’t seen any leper cons, he had seen soldiers in trucks and boys on horses but did not see any pick up trucks. A song by Vampire Weekend came on the radio. He drove his exotic Ford Ranger a mile a minute and a truck pulled in front of him unexpectedly. He hit his brakes and swerved around it. Apparently he did not want to die, when death got to close the survival mechanisms kicked in. His life was long stretches of boredom punctuated with brief moments of terror. Life was obviously to complex if a moment’s negligence could cost a life time of diligence. The door ajar light came on the dashboard for no reason. ‘All the lights in my control room have been blinking red for some years’, he thought, ‘yet I manage to keep my little engine moving.’ He pulled into the right lane to exit behind a slow VW van with a 'Visualize Peace' bumper stick on it. He tried to visualize the van doing the speed limit. He saw some Japanese businessmen in a German Mercedes wearing Italian suits and wondered who had really won World War II. Elvis Costello’s The Long Honeymoon came on the radio with its refrain of “there’s no money back guarantee...” He made it to the parking lot without further incident and went into the store. He stood among the packaged and artificial looking food which was convenient as long as you had money. He noticed the teenage girls with their chitter chatter of hot monkey love wandering around but he was invisible to them. He could see thru them like glass and knew they could not penetrate his entangled reality. Would they think of him as a monster? He was so foreign and alien to them as to be unworthy the effort of understanding. Conform, breed and die. Was he seeing people clearer or were they becoming more transparent? If only he could smoke and drink and love and forget his troubles, oh to be young and stupid again. He had always looked for women more intelligent than he to have relationships with so he could learn from them. ‘Boy did I get taught some lessons,’ he thought. He felt he was a lighthouse of intelligence in a dark sea of ignorance. Unfortunately people steered around him, as a ship steers around whatever dangerous shoal the light was warning about. ‘I am obviously very intelligent; no one understands a word I say,’ he thought bitterly. He passed the academia nuts and thought he must look like a pig in sheep’s clothing but he felt like an outlaw in his heart. He was the godfather of mock, stranger in a strange land, and getting stranger all the time. Rounding the frozen food isle he moved on down the prepared food aisle. Overweight shoppers with their overlade carts studied the various racks of the same product made by different manufacturers with the intense senility of the calcified mind set in their ways. Finn realized they were younger than he as he danced around them with his little hand basket. He passed cuts of meat and thought about animal rights but should there not also be human rights? ‘I believe that all the people of the world should be granted access to clean water,’ he pronounced to himself. ‘This is the first thing that should be done. It follows that people should have the food they need. Then housing. Health care should be available to all who need it and then higher education for all who want it. This sets priorities; there would be a considerable amount of work to accomplish these few things on a worldwide scale. It is true that this would not generate any immediate revenue but some things are more important than money. Unfortunately capitalism needs artificial shortages to keep prices high. Instead we have a huge prison population which seems to be keeping the crime down and the home mortgage fiasco is the latest banking scam foisted upon the public for which they will again bail out the rich and none of those perpetraitors will go to jail. We need more law and order to save us from the rebellion that is created by the laws of our repressive system. It can be seen that American politicians who want to bomb enemies back into the Stone Age and spend more money than some countries have for a budget in a race for president while calling each other names, that priorities are misplaced and our politics are totally corrupt. Who would I vote for? The all night party. The current president has proven himself to be the perfect ass whole. Should I rail toothlessly against the government? To what point? One gets old and dies before the government changes. There are things to be angry about, there is injustice every day. I can’t be angry all of the time; I would rather be playing in the flowers. I want to be happy inside but I am not ignorant of the inequities of life. There are those who say life is to be endured, and any enjoyment is wrong because it takes you away from the seriousness of life. I am the opposite of that. If life and death don’t matter, as in Iraq, then life and death is not so serious. Life is temporal and you can only laugh at the plight of yourself and others because you cannot change it. I want a world that nurtures life but decisions made in the bored room create a political reality that seems to be quite the opposite. To say god is love is not too difficult to understand, it just means that governments should stop killing people and help them instead.’ The muse ack played terrible versions of his favorite songs and he moved quicker so he could get out of there as fast as possible. “Wassup dude!” said one young man with the eubonic plague to another at a chance meeting. He was one of those guys who reminded Finn of a bull mastiff dog with sunglasses. A hard stiff bastard without scruples, over six feet tall, heavy but not fat. He looked like he would try anything and was unafraid of anyone. The two guys began a complex series of hand movements, at once sophisticated and primitive. Finn got into line between carts overlade with huge packages of goods. After an interminable wait the grocery clerk quickly scanned his basket of simple sustenance. “Paper or plastic?” asked the indifferent clerk as if this were the most important question of his day. He awoke from his reverie and muttered, “Whatever”. She looked like a reptile with a nice hairdo. He hated the guardians of the gate, the clerks you had to pass thru, the toll takers, the box office ticket people who could deny you exit or entrance depending on their whim. She gave him an odd look that said she would lock him in her personal dungeon as he was a threat to the consumer economy and therefore dangerous. She handed him his receipt and groceries and said, “Have a nice day sir.” It was the kind of statement he reserved for people who gave him a hard time at the office. People always seemed to get pissed off at him whenever he spoke his mind about them and usually if he talked about anything he thought. During the drive back home the psychic car radio placed on the public station sang tunes as if in anticipation that matched his moods as he drove back home. He reassured himself, ‘To save the world, point out the errors of the past and the guides of the present. Is life predominated by psychic plague? Perhaps it is so. The psychic plague cannot be conquered unless it is well known. The majority of people accept polluted air and food, dangerous roads and bridges, processed and microwaved food, gossip magazines in the supermarkets, severe treatment from others, etc. The majority of people won't accept socialized medicine, healthy social conditions, maximum love and organic lifestyles. Obviously the opinion of the majority is not worth a damn. Being rich used to mean having time to practice art or music or science. Today being rich means spending all of your time making and keeping money.’ When he got home he took the dishes out of the dishwasher and put them away. He went to the dryer and took out the tee shirt but the table cloth had shrunk by half. Feeling like the worlds biggest fool he put it on the table but it did not cover it anymore. When Mr. Pig got home he said cheerily, “Honey, I shrunk the tablecloth.” “I know,” she sounded resigned in an irritated sort of way. “I expected it would happen, I figured it out on the way home.” For dinner he made a simple spaghetti dish with a salad and garlic bread. During dinner Mrs. Pig accidentally dipped her parmesan cheese as she was grating it into the spaghetti sauce and cursed and wiped off the cheese and did it again. “Damn it!” she exclaimed. She grated the cheese again and said, “There, I did it!” “You just have to be smarter than the cheese,” he rejoined. “I was smarter than the cheese,” she said triumphantly. “One out of three times,” he said causally. Then he laughed when she looked offended. “I’m sure you would win in a fair contest,” he said sympathetically. They ate for awhile in silence. “We should open an English restaurant,” he said. “They won’t be able to tell if the food is an English recipe or just bad cooking, it’s foolproof.” He did the dishes after dinner and contemplated the menial labor. At the turn of the century the average person had the IQ of an idiot, things moved slowly in an agrarian society. Now there were so many diverse complexities that you had to use all of your genius to survive. And of the future? Was it global warming or a new ice age that was threatening? There was evidence of both. The old signs had become unreliable, plunged into a new meme one had to sort out for oneself the direction that nature was taking. Different political factors for either side used scientists as lawyers lobbying nature to move opinion this way or that depending on which interest paid the most money. What happened to objectivity? One could collect facts but wasn’t all objectivity subjected to human bias? It was the human viewpoint that humans related to so facts became unimportant. He turned on the talk radio. The ugly jibber jabber of the hard right wing flew in a death spiral while the impotent left shrilled its warning cry of eminent disaster and called for change. Pointless wars were wasting all the assets of the country. The war machines of space and time were ruining reality. Was it the drugs that had been found in the drinking water? They were in small increments which made slight but irrevocable course changes in human direction. The mad maddening madness was driving him mad. What was the point? What did not matter? Relax and enjoy the fall of man unkind. Did the future of the memory of man really matter in the vast scheme of things? The individual worried for the individual’s life but did it matter anymore than killing a germ on a kitchen sink or putting to sleep an excess population of feral cats? All that was born would die, should god be arrested for murder? The earth was supposed to be heaven and everybody was turning it into hell as fast as possible. Life was overrated; plenty of civilizations had been plowed under. So many species had become extinct. The sun was showing signs of becoming unstable. Extinction was nature’s eviction notice. The threat of 2012 loomed on the horizon as the solar system edged toward the middle of the galaxy; a thousand bad signs were converging into a tight vector destined to change the course of history into the apocalypse of a thousand year peace. He put on some Philip Glass and sat at the computer and caught up on his E-mail. Pickle jumped into his lap and buried her head in his arm. Finn told the cat, “God won’t tell me why I am here, god is afraid I will fuck it up if I know.” He decided that living with himself was like living with an idiot. Life was a process for learning what not to do. If his life was a video game his icon would be in the dead end of a maze, little feet marching with face planted in the wall as if the player had wandered away and left the game to kill itself off. The robot of aging and the monster of poverty inexorably moved in to kill the abandoned icon. Feeling hopeless he thought, ‘Who knows if they'll be alive tomorrow. I could get the big blue screen of death at any time. Paranoia is simply having all the facts.’ Entropy seemed to be speeding up, everything was going to hell faster than it used to. He could feel his life drain in constantly moving grains from his left foot. His life was like a near empty theater in which a bad magician performed mundane but unexpected tricks and never explained anything. He felt he had been plagued by the trickster his whole life. If the doors of perception were cleaned, then everything would be seen as it is, a dirty trick behind closed doors. He was a carbon based life form, carbon the sixth element, 6 electrons, 6 protons, 6 neutrons; the physical was the devil’s province. His brain had been over clocking all day trying to figure this stuff out. Feeling like he had a head full of bees his dream deprived unconscious knew he had to sleep again. Today had been a state of waking nightmare; tomorrow at the office would be much the same. Tomorrow he could go back to being a simple civil servant, or as the people on the other side of the desk seemed to see him, as a servile serpent. But there was no need to dwell on it, the torture would never stop. He was depressed by the ten thousand defeats of his everyday life. As he lay in bed he said his meditation chant silently in his mind. He wanted his soul to be light as a feather but it felt as heavy as the black iron prison of physical reality. He hoped he wouldn’t have the nightmare of that incomprehensible Irish funeral again.
Copyright © 2008 Michael Potter |